Analysis: Oil companies target pre-salt despite energy transition
The transfer of rights surplus volume bidding of Sepia and Atapu fields became the third-largest ever in Brazil’s oil and gas industry, considering fixed payments. The bidding raised R$11.1 billion, only behind the first round of surpluses, which raised R$69.9 billion in 2019, and the 2013 Libra sharing auction, which raised R$15 billion. The result shows that even in the face of increasing efforts by oil companies to decarbonize their businesses, oil reserves in the Brazilian pre-salt layer still draw the gaze of multinationals navigating energy transition.TotalEnergies and Shell, two of the oil companies that have been betting the most on diversifying their businesses, doubled down on the Brazilian pre-salt and will disburse R$2.9 billion and R$1 billion, respectively, in fixed concession payments for the auctioned assets.The French company took a 28% stake in the Sépia consortium and 22.5% in Atapu, while Shell took a 25% stake in Atapu.In a note, the Brazilian Petroleum Institute (IBP), a trade group of the local industry, said that Friday’s round represented the "last opportunity to tap the large volumes already discovered in the pre-salt layer."Sépia and Atapu represent, for the buyers, an opportunity to immediately tap fields in production stage, diversifying their respective sources of cash generation. Shell and TotalEnergies are among the best positioned multinationals in the Brazilian pre-salt.The interest in the assets, at a time when companies are gearing up for energy transition, can be explained, curiously enough, by the environmental issue itself - and by the low cost of extraction of the projects. Although investing in more oil reserves may seem counterintuitive, given the increasing efforts of companies to invest in clean energy, the pre-salt holds an important characteristic for these companies: low emissions volumes, due to the high productivity of the wells - which reduces the carbon emissions per barrel.Faced with the potential drop in global demand for oil in the coming decades and smaller consumer market in the future, oil companies calculate that only the most competitive projects - both in costs and emissions - will prevail in the long run.The pre-salt oil is, for example, the flagship of Petrobras’s strategy for energy transition. The Brazilian state-owned company, more timid than its global peers in business diversification plans, wants to position itself as the producer with the lowest carbon barrel in the global...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃO